You are missing the point.

Its not about “what is in everything”. If you’d go there, so is quantum physics, yet you’re not taught that in high school.

The point is that the widespread passive application of concepts or certain ideas even in everyday life does not inform the usefulness of in depth understanding of the theories behind them.

Thats why I pointed out traffic engineering and linguistics, because the surface concept is extremely simple but in depth understanding is a hard field to get into.

I work in rail traffic engineering. I use the phrase (translated to english) “light blue EnKo coming, get 28504 to 503 so turn off autoswitching and dont forget short entry or use DRGT quickly” a decent amount. I would probably need a day or two to explain to you what that even meant, and a decent amount longer to have you fully grasp why everything works the way it does in that specific instance.

Yet it is a standard operation that gets used here in variations thousands of times a day.

High level mathematics are not valuable for a sizeable amount of the population. Which is why they’re used as a brain tester instead.

And most people do not like getting passively tested on their learning capability with arbitrary excercises designed to weed you out instead of making the concept itself accessible to you. Hence the hatred of math as a teaching subject.

Oh and yes, I too was taught standard electronics. I bet you still can’t instantly fully grasp and explain the relay plan of an industrial power plant. That’s the whole problem.

It’s the difference between knowing of E=mc² and understanding the proof behind it. Maths as a subject wants you to do the latter, almost every other subject is fine with the former.

Thats a pretty disconnected statement. The entirety of every single country’s economy and a large part of your daily life runs on language, logistics and infrastructure.

Yet I bet neither high stress traffic management nor fundamentals of phonemes are things you’d consider universal knowledge.

Math leaves “basic knowledge” at the high school stage and enters “expanded logical thinking” without ever telling you while being taught pretty much everywhere in the most conservative, high impact - low retention way.

And Uni math is often just used as a sorting course to weed out people not fit for engineering jobs. Its connection to practical purposes is often faint if not noexistant.

The fact that Mathematicians use nomenclature that makes the IPA look self explainatory doesn’t help.

My nearest lowest tier rail bound mass transit system is the S-Bahn Hannover which uses Stadler FLIRT XL 3 at a top speed of 160km/h, yet they only serve Hannover and its immediate surroundings.

This is also the case with the S-Bahn Bern (using Stadler KISS), parts of the S-Bahn Rhine-Ruhr, the S-Bahn Bremen, S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland (Leipzig Halle), S-Bahn Dresden, S-Bahn Zurich and Wiener Schnellbahnen.

If you live near a big(ger) city in the DACH Region but not directly in it (meaning out of range of its Tram system) this is absolutely not uncommon.

Just so we’re on the same level here - your own article states that high speed rail as it is most commonly referred to means speeds of above at least 200km/h, more commonly beyond 250. Lower speeds are “higher speed rail” in America, or regional/local lines in Europe. My local lowest tier urban mass transit has a normal speed of 160km/h.

America has ONE Line with speeds beyond 250, and that is where all except one of its 200+ speeds lie aswell. That is, sorry, a joke. For one line a network does not make.

Look at that same graphic in the article on the high speed network in Europe and tell me they are even close to comparable.

Which ones? Which company actually has put out a consistent, significant, structurally sound high speed rail network including stations and the trains themselves that is based in the US?

And headhunting foreign talent tells me that you have not worked in the rail planning sector. These companies are extraordinarily protective of their high value who are the executive “talent” behind their stuff. And the biggest rail tech companies are multinational conglomerates (Alstombardier, Siemens, CRRC, Hitachi) who have no desire or need to outsource to America.

There is noone currently who has both intimate knowledge of American geodetic planning and high stress track planning. And building that knowledge takes a lot of trial and error.

That still is not correct.

Planning a high speed high throughput flexible passenger rail network is a whole different beast than laying non-electrified single track lines in a straight line through the middle of nowhere that basically only serves the occasional 2miles long freight train.

The parameters are vastly different and almost incomparable. And America has decidedly no expertise left in the former.